Stocker Dick

Dick Stocker
 
William Richard “Dick” Stocker was born 1886 in Pemberton, Wigan. He started his working life as a drapers’ assistant and it is believed that both his mother and father were drapers. He was a political co-worker with Jim Cannon, father of Les Cannon, later of the Electricians’ Union. Stocker joined the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) in 1906 and for a period was its national organiser. Later he joined the British Socialist Party (BSP) and became its national Chair at its 1915 annual conference, although he made a point of working closely with the more well-known SLP leaders, Bell and MacManus. 
 
In the 1920s, Stocker was Manchester Communist Party District Treasurer. Unusually for a Communist, he had managed to secure a post of warehouse manager for Messrs Lester Ltd and owned a car and later even a farm outside Manchester. As Stocker was one of the few Communists in the North West to own a car, he was dispatched to London during the General Strike of 1926 to pick up copies of the Communist Party’s emergency strike bulletin “The Workers Daily” for distribution in the North West and Scotland.
 
When unloading copies of the paper at the Communist Party headquarters in Manchester on Tuesday 4th May 1926, Stoker was approached by the police and who arrested him, and only the foresight of YCL members in smuggling away copies stopped the whole run been seized by police. Stoker was charged by the police with “(h)aving attempted to do an act calculated to cause dissatisfaction among his majesty’s forces or civilian population” and was sentenced to two months in jail.  It was later claimed that he was the first Communist Party member to be arrested during the General Strike.
 
 
Michael Walker